DATA ENGINEER

Type: Full-time, permanent

Compensation: ₦1,100,000 – ₦1,600,000/month, plus benefits

Location: Remote in Nigeria

Reports to: Technology Operations Manager

Apply here: https://hiring.lafiya.org/r/PRdkjd

Deadline: ‍ ‍23:30 West Africa Time, Thursday 5 November 2026

About Lafiya

At Lafiya, we're on a mission to make contraception accessible to anyone who needs it and wants it, no matter where they live. Through our network of dedicated female health professionals, our Lafiya Sisters, we provide information and deliver contraception directly to communities that need it most. Our approach is cost-effective, community-based, and deeply rooted in respect and agency. We operate in hard-to-reach communities that otherwise do not have access to contraceptive products and information. We currently run our core programme across five states in northern Nigeria, managing 600+ Lafiya Sisters. In addition to our direct community-based work, we are partnering with the government to co-create sustainable financing models for contraception procurement and to address critical data and delivery gaps. To date, we have supported more than 1,000,000 women through our innovative last-mile approach.

We're a fast-growing nonprofit in the middle of a transition from a start-up to a scale-up. Our focus is on impact, cost-effectiveness, and ensuring our work enhances the dignity and agency of those we serve. Lafiya was founded in 2022 and is funded by some of the world’s most discerning donors seeking evidence-backed impact at large scale, such as GiveWell, Mulago Foundation, Dovetail Impact Foundation, The Life You Can Save and Founders Pledge. GiveWell estimates our programme to be 14x their benchmark. By 2030, we aim to reach 20 million women with family planning services, operating in six countries, focused on increased government co-payment for financial sustainability. 

Position Overview 

As Lafiya transitions from startup to national scale, the data behind our work needs a solid foundation. We are looking for a Data Engineer to build and own the pipelines and data infrastructure that turn messy, multi-source field data into clean, reliable, analysis-ready information for our Monitoring, Evaluation & Learning (MEL) team and beyond.

You will sit at the point where our operational tools meet our analytics. You will build the pipelines that bring data from SurveyCTO, Airtable and other sources into our database, design the tables that hold it, and model it so our MEL team can answer real questions and build dashboards they trust. This is a hands-on, end-to-end role for a pragmatic builder who is as comfortable writing a resilient data pipeline as they are walking a non-technical colleague through what the numbers mean. If you want to own the data backbone of a fast-moving organisation, where your work directly enables better decisions about contraceptive access in Nigeria, this is the role for you.

What You’ll Do

  • Build and run data pipelines: design, build and maintain ETL pipelines that bring data from multiple sources (SurveyCTO, Airtable, and others) into our central database, reliably and on a schedule.

  • Model data for analysis: create and maintain the schemas for new tables, and join and shape data from different sources in our analytics tool so it is ready for MEL analysis.

  • Support MEL and dashboards: work alongside the MEL team to build and improve dashboards, translating their questions into the data models and queries that answer them.

  • Keep the data clean and trustworthy: handle the unglamorous realities of real-world data (deduplication, incremental loads, reconciliation, messy formats) so that what lands in the database is accurate and consistent.

  • Operate the database day to day: manage users, roles and access, keep an eye on performance, and look after backups and connectivity on our managed Postgres instance.

  • Work in the open and keep it reproducible: keep code and infrastructure in version control with sensible software hygiene, so the stack is maintainable and not dependent on any one person's memory.

  • Mind data governance and privacy: treat the sensitive, personal nature of our data with care, building pipelines and access controls that keep beneficiary information protected.

Who You Are

We are looking for a pragmatic, hands-on data engineer who enjoys owning a problem end to end, from the raw, messy source all the way to a clean table someone can actually use. You are happy being the person who makes the data work, you care about getting the details right, and you can explain what you have built to someone who has never written a line of SQL.

You’re someone who:

  • Build things that last. You don't just move data from A to B; you build pipelines that keep running, fail loudly when something is wrong, and are easy for the next person to understand.

  • Is comfortable owning the whole stack. You have likely been the (or one of very few) data people on a small team, so you are used to wearing several hats and figuring things out without a specialist on hand for every task.

  • Talks to humans, not just machines. You can sit with a non-technical colleague, understand what they are really asking, and translate it into something the data can answer.

  • Takes data governance seriously. You instinctively think about who should see what, and you handle personal and sensitive data with the care it deserves.

  • Learns fast and works independently. You are comfortable saying when you don't know something and enjoy figuring it out, and you can pick up a new tool or cloud service without hand-holding.

Qualifications & Skills

Education & Experience

  • Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Data Engineering, Data Science, Information Technology, Engineering, Mathematics, or a related quantitative/technical discipline is strongly preferred.

  • Around 3 to 6 years of hands-on experience in data engineering or a closely related role. We care more about what you have actually built than the exact number of years.

  • A track record of personally building and operating data pipelines end to end, in production, not just contributing a single piece of someone else's.

  • Experience working directly against a managed cloud database (for example Google Cloud SQL, AWS RDS, or the Azure equivalent).

Skills and Personal Qualities

  • Mandatory

    • Strong SQL, ideally with PostgreSQL. This is the foundation of the role.

    • Fluent Python for data work (for example at the psycopg2 / pandas level), for building and maintaining ETL pipelines.

    • Solid relational schema design and data modelling.

    • Strong ETL fundamentals: idempotency, incremental and upsert loads, deduplication, and handling messy, real-world source data and reconciliation.

    • Working competence on a cloud platform, with GCP strongly preferred (Cloud SQL, Cloud Run, Cloud Scheduler, Secret Manager, IAM).

    • Operational database skills on Postgres: roles and grants, indexing basics, backup and restore, SSL and connectivity, and reading query performance.

    • Git and good basic software hygiene, so that code and infrastructure live in version control.

    • A genuine data-governance and privacy instinct, given the sensitive nature of our data.

    • The ability to communicate clearly with non-technical colleagues.

  • Nice to have

    • DevOps-adjacent skills: Docker, nginx, Linux VM administration, and deploying services on Cloud Run.

    • Familiarity with SurveyCTO (or any CAPI / survey platform) and with Airtable as a data source.

    • Familiarity with a BI / analytics tool.

    • Analytics-engineering or dbt experience, for where our modelling layer is heading.

Why should you apply

You will be joining a young, ambitious and supportive organisation that is growing quickly. We are serious about impact and serious about investing in our people. There will be room to take initiative, make decisions, and leave your mark on a critical stage of Lafiya's growth. We don't have layers of approval or slow processes. If something makes sense, we'll try it.

Benefits include:

  • 40 days’ of combined holiday and paid annual leave 

  • Fully paid parental leave 

  • Performance-based bonuses

  • Flexibility in where, when and how you work 

  • Working closely with a team of senior leaders who are collaborative, ambitious and serious about impact.

  • HMO insurance cover, travel reimbursements, possibility of a co-working space.

  • Annual team retreat with all expenses paid.


What is the recruitment process for this role?

We value your time and aim to make our recruitment process as insightful as possible. It includes: 

  • Stage 1: Application Form & Assessment. Share your CV and complete a 40-minute multiple-choice quiz to assess your fit for the role.

  • Stage 2: Test Task. Engage in a 2-3 hour task that mirrors the kind of work you'll do with us.

  • Stage 3: Interview. This is the final stage, after which we’ll make offers. All candidates will be asked the same questions in a 1-hour interview, and you’ll get the questions in advance. It will also be an opportunity for you to ask us questions.

We're committed to transparency and will provide feedback from Stage 2 onwards. If you're ready to embark on this journey with us, apply here: https://hiring.lafiya.org/r/PRdkjd 

FAQs

  • When will my applications be processed? We process applications submitted to the application form after the closing date of the vacancy. All applications will be processed at the same time. We do not review on a rolling basis. 

  • Will every applicant receive a response? We send responses to all applicants, whether you are moving forward to a next round or not. Sometimes, our responses may take up to four weeks after the application deadline, since we are processing many applications. Thank you for your patience.

  • There is a problem with my test task. What should I do? Please send an email to For any questions, reach out to our Careers Team at careers+dataengineer@lafiyanigeria.org with a screenshot of what went wrong, so we can assist you. Do not email this address with questions about the status of your application. We get back to all candidates with an application response.

For any questions, reach out to our Operations Team at operations@lafiyanigeria.org